My Childhood Baseball Glove, Intensity and Your Website

04/23/2008

- Andrew Wetzler, President

MoreVisibility

I am often thinking about analogies between life in and out of the office, so here’s one that struck me. I was throwing a baseball with my kids the other day. They have just recently embraced the idea of playing catch with a baseball glove and also have begun to throw hard enough that it is beginning to hurt my hand (without a glove). I hadn’t bought a baseball glove for myself ever, I still have the one my parents bought me when I was a teen.

That glove is clearly too small for my hand and I have since bought a new one, but for me it’s a collector’s item. In addition to lots of great memories (catches and some drops), the glove is a Brooks Robinson autographed model. For those of you who are unfamiliar with Brooks Robinson, he is considered by many to have been the greatest third baseman ever. He played for the Baltimore Orioles for his entire major league career which spanned 2896 games over 23 seasons.

He wrote a book that was published in 1971 called Putting It All Together, which chronicled his career and particularly his dedication and work ethic. He was renowned for his attitude, his intense focus and attention to detail both in terms of hitting and fielding. The Baseball Hall of Fame’s website states, “Known as The Human Vacuum Cleaner, Brooks Robinson established a standard of excellence for modern-day third basemen.”

As web marketers, we need to put it all together in order to excel on our playing fields. Having recently gone through a redesign of our corporate site, MoreVisibility.com, I have an renewed appreciation of how much work is actually involved in building out and then marketing a new website. There are a significantly greater number of decisions to be made and tasks to be accomplished than it appears on the surface to achieve both SEO and usability objectives. And that’s just to launch a redesigned site!

Equally intense focus needs to be applied to continually tweaking a site for SEO, usability, and most importantly conversions. The percentage of sites today that are truly great is incredibly small, yet there are not a lot of inherent barriers to developing (and marketing) one.

I encourage you to objectively assess the degree to which you are focused on your site every day and are making ongoing improvements. Brooks Robinson was taking batting practice and fielding grounders for his entire career. Anything short of excellence was not an option.